The Evolution Of Language

For the working generation the importance of adopting another language is crucial for business success, yet the younger Britons have found a way round this and see little point in learning a new skill when they can just picture it instead.

As language develops, text speak infiltrates, making English even harder to learn for those who don’t speak it as a first language. The English vocabulary already has the most amount of words in the world with over eight hundred thousand and now it has abbreviations galore that need Google to translate. While some champion the change calling those who hate text speak old and fuddy duddy, labelling the acronyms as a natural progression of language, others worry about how it affecting the language we’re so proud of.

A Place for the Smiley Face      

In business, emails play an important part. If replies to businesses and customers were hand written on paper in letter form for just one day we’d be quite astonished about the amount of paper, and time they’d take to write. In many ways email is saving the written word but there is still a pace for the smiley face. Unlike face to face communication or indeed over the phone, voice afflictions cannot be heard. The smiley face removes any ambiguity over sarcasm or intention of words and is infinitely better than using lol.

Go Emoji Go

The smiley face isn’t enough though, now we have a whole keyboard full of characters that express different phrases, emotions and sentiments in one simple icon. A great facilitator between those that speak foreign languages, they’re mostly used between teenagers who speak the same tongue. There are now hundreds of emoticons to choose from and for most, searching for the perfect little face takes more time than writing the actual phrase.

The Aged Divide

As an example of how the divide between generations is according to text speak, like many of us over thirty one woman assumed that LOL translated as Lots of Love. She realised her mistake as she received replies to a round robin text she’d sent to tens of family members, close and distant to let them know that “Great Aunt Marge has passed away, LOL” Yet this isn’t what worries professors the most, it’s the removal of over 16,000 hyphens from the English language because “people haven’t time to insert a hyphen into words” Whatever happens to the English language it’s quite clear that regardless of our native tongue we’ll have to constantly learn and adapt in order to keep up with the ever changing trends.